Can science, business and humour get along together well? It seems so, as the name given to the first kitten ever cloned, which appeared on the pages of Nature magazine, is “CC”.
We already knew that cats were on top of the list of the animals possibly cloned. The caesarean birth of “Copy Cat”, a small tortie tabby and white female, on December 22, 2001, confirmed these suppositions and marked a decisive turn. So far, cloning had only concerned livestock animals or animals destined to medical research. With Copy Cat, a new era has begun, that of the lucrative CCC, Company Cloned Cat.
While many biotechnology companies were on the list, it was finally the Genetic saving company, which reached its goal the first. After having failed to clone dogs, the teams of searchers turned towards cats, whose egg would be easy to manipulate, and implanted 87 embryos, to succeed in obtaining one kitten. Confronted to the rescue associations, which say that the number of stray cats is already high enough not to create more artificially, the project manager answered: “it takes eggs to make clones. Sometimes hundreds of eggs. Where will we find those eggs? With the spayed females. And what will trade these eggs for? Money. Thanks to us, hundreds of cats will be spayed to give birth to a clone.” Now don’t say that you didn’t know that the Genetic Saving and Clone company was actually a charity trust.
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